1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to location based services, and in particular, to a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for detecting the location of a mobile device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Location based services (LBS) are applications/services that utilize or are based on the location of a mobile device (e.g., a cellular phone, a personal digital assistant, etc.). It is desirable to customize LBS applications for individual users based on information known about the users. However, such information is often not locally available and is difficult or impossible to access. Accordingly, what is needed is the ability to access and utilize a user's personal information. These problems may be better understood by describing location based services and the use of personal information.
Detecting the location of a mobile device is fundamental to providing location based services. For example, detecting that a device is located on a particular street (e.g., McInnis Parkway) allows an LBS application to provide a nearby theatre (e.g., Northgate Mall Cinema) when a user requests the closest entertainment option. Additional examples of LBS applications include traffic updates, location sensitive billing, fleet management, and asset and people tracking.
LBS applications may be customized for individual users using personal information about the user (i.e., the user's profile information). For example, the user's profile information may include the user's name, home/office address, and even preferences related to choice of cuisine, travel preferences, etc. By transmitting this information to a wireless device (e.g., cellular phone), an LBS application may be highly customized to suit a user's preferences. This personalized data is currently available from telephone operators, wireless carrier databases, etc. and is often reloaded into an LBS database. For example, to utilize profile information maintained by a mobile phone carrier, the entire database may be transferred and stored locally.
Such reloading of personalized information results in increased cost (i.e., time, effort, and dollars), and synchronization problems (i.e. over a period of time, a difference may develop between the source and the data duplicated in the LBS database). Further, the data may come in different formats, different schemas, from databases from different vendors, from files from different operating systems, and custom data is not LBS-aware (i.e., does not have a location element). Additionally, the mobile phone carrier may not allow the transfer of the database.